Last week I blogged about how I’ve been finding newspaper articles about my father’s family in Olympia, Washington, in the first part of the 20th century. Despite being the state capital, Olympia’s newspaper has a decidedly small-town feel. I was able to find a couple of dozen (if not more) articles about my family, each of which gives me a little nugget of information and a little more of a sense of how they lived.
This morning, I created a twelve-minute screencast of how I process these articles. If you haven’t set up a process yourself, you might find it helpful.
As I said in the screencast, this is one of probably many ways to do it and it’s not necessarily the best way, but it works for me.
To summarize the steps, here’s what I do:
- Click on the article in Genealogy Bank
- Click the PDF button to get a pdf of the full page
- Open the page in Preview
- Zoom in on the article itself
- Use Grab to take a screenshot of just the article, in an easily readable size
- Name the full-page pdf, using my file-naming protocol, and file it in the Surnames folder
- Copy the name and paste into the filename of the zoomed-in snip, adding the word “snip” to the first part of the file name
- Add one fact from the article in Reunion, creating a source record for the article
- Paste the source information from the Reunion source record into the Comments section of the two image files in Finder
- Move the full-page and the snip file from the Surnames folder to the appropriate subfolder for the person mentioned in the article
- Drag the image files into the Multimedia area of the source record in Reunion
- Glean the rest of the information, attaching the newly created source to each fact
Watching the screencast will probably make that more understandable.
I hope you find it helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions!
Oh, my gosh – I have never before been able to figure out how to clip articles from genealogy bank. Thank you!!!
Caroly, I’m so glad you found it helpful!!
I appreciate the step-by-step description of your process. And I thought illustrating that process with a screencast was very helpful. Another of your blog entries about work flow has helped me get more systematic about documenting and storing what I find. Thanks for taking the time to share your methods, which are particularly informative for me as a Mac and Reunion user.
Thanks so much for your comment, Wendy! I’m so glad you’ve this blog helpful.
I just finished reading “Paperless Genealogy Guide” and wondered how you handled the file naming & documenting the various newspaper websites. Thank You! Since you’re researching family in Olympia, I don’t know if you’ve explored this site: https://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/
Michele, thanks for buying the Paperless Genealogy Guide! I’m glad this screencast answered that question for you. And thanks for mentioning the Washington Digital Archives. I do use it, but mostly when it comes up as search results (it’s been very helpful with cemetery records). I should explore it some more though! Thanks for commenting.